Monday, January 4, 2016

The New York Times is reporting on Chinese government
efforts to stem the tide of Islamist terrorism in the Xinjiang region, the
place where most of China’s ten million Uighurs live. Reports from the region
are very rare indeed, so this one is well worth heeding, without any excessive
commentary.

After a 2014 terrorist attack, the government began a
crackdown:

After 43 people were killed in a pair of attacks in
the regional capital, Urumqi, in 2014, Beijing began a “strike hard special
operation” that it says has dismantled nearly 200 terrorist groups and resulted
in the execution of at least 49 people. The state news media describes those
caught in the crackdown as terrorism suspects or separatists seeking an
independent Xinjiang, and blames recurring violence in the region on jihadists
influenced or directed by agents overseas.

Rather than attack Islamophobia, as the Obama administration
does, the Chinese authorities are trying to suppress Islam.

The Times reports:

Families
sundered by a wave of detentions. Mosques barred from broadcasting the call to
prayer. Restrictions on the movements of laborers that have wreaked havoc on
local agriculture. And a battery of ever more intrusive ways to monitor the
communications of citizens for possible threats to public security.

Evidently, the local population is severely unhappy with
what is going on:

A
recent 10-day journey across the Xinjiang region in the far west of China revealed a
society seething with anger and trepidation as the government, alarmed by a
slow-boil insurgency that has claimed hundreds of lives, has introduced
unprecedented measures aimed at shaping the behavior and beliefs of China’s 10
million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim
minority that considers this region its homeland.

And also:

Here in
Kashgar, the fabled Silk Road outpost near China’s border with Pakistan and
Afghanistan, officials have banned mosques from broadcasting the call to
prayer, forcing muezzins to shout out the invocation five times a day from
rooftops across the city. The new rule is an addition to longstanding policies
that prohibit after-school religious classes and children under 18 from
entering mosques. (The installation of video cameras on mosque doorways in
recent months makes such rules hard to ignore.)

Southeast
of Kashgar, shopkeepers in the city of Hotan seethed over a government decision
to outlaw two dozen names considered too Muslim, forcing parents to rename
their children or be unable to register them for school, according to local
residents and the police.

Finally:

And
farther north in Ghulja, an ethnically diverse city near the Kazakh border with a history of tensions, a pair of unemployed
college graduates fumed about a crackdown prohibiting young men from wearing
beards and women from veiling their faces. Those who ignore the rules are
sometimes jailed, residents said.

Of course, savvy Westerners believe that the government
effort to suppress Islam will produce more radicals and more
terrorism.

This remains to be seen. If it does, the policy will be discredited. If it tamps down extremism other nations will be tempted to adopt it.